"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination."   - Albert Einstein.

Supercomputing SC06 is the premier international event in 2006 on high performance computing, bringing together the experts in various areas in the field. This year's conference took place in Tampa, Florida, and we made a number of important announcements there. Supercomputing is rapidly becoming competitive advantage in not just for scientists, but for corporate enterprises, and emerging businesses as well. Not to mention governments as they are working on building national competitive advantage, as I have discussed before.

I attended the event earlier this week, and here are a few photos I shot:

 © 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved  

Here are some of the key announcements Sun made this week in the area of high performance computing.
- We announced Sun HPC Quick Start Services, a comprehensive suite of pre-configured services designed to help customers architect, implement, and manage their HPC environment with faster deployment, improved performance, reduced risk, and lower cost.
- We announced the Sun Blade 8000 P Modular System, the first blade server designed for high-end x64 clusters.
- We announced the Sun Ultra 40 M2 workstation, the industry's fastest workstation.
- We announced Sun Grid Rack System for Scalable Storage.
- We announced Sun HPC ClusterTools 6 Software,
 an integrated toolkit that allows developers to create and tune MPI applications that run on clusters and SMPs, as well as the Sun HPC Cluster Tools 7, Early Access Program.
- We announced the relese of 3 new modules to the Grid Engine Project, making a key contribution to the advancement of open-source technologies for HPC.

Now that's a lot of announcements, but I'm not done. We also made some announcements on Sun Grid Compute Utility at Network.com. We are seeing a lot of interest among HPC ISVs in Sun Grid, and we are currently working with over 15 software vendors who will be hosting their HPC applications on Sun Grid and deliver them as a service to their end users. This will be the world's first true HPC software as a service (HPC SaaS) utility enabling the software vendors to create a new avenue for revenue generation. The utility model is very beneficial to the end users as they get access to the software without the need to invest in expensive infrastructure; on Sun Grid you only pay for what you use, no long term commitment, no contract required.

Sun Gridathon
At Supercomputing '06 we ran one of our Gridathon sessions. The Sun Gridathon allowed the conference attendees to meet face to face with the designers and engineers behind Sun Grid to explore and have in-depth technical discussion on everything relating to grid.

 
© 2006 Kristinn Thorleifsson, all rights reserved
Sun Grid Product Line Manager, David Folk, delivers the Sun Gridathon presentation in Tampa, Florida.

I have mentioned earlier that in order to bring the Sun Gridathon to more people we have developed an online version that is has two components. The first component, a live video presentation, outlining the Sun Grid Compute Utility is available today, click here to view it. The second component of the Sun Gridathon is a live interactive chat session that will enable you to bring your questions to Sun Grid engineers and designers. The live chat is scheduled for December 7. To sign up for a reminder, click here.